Last week, Coursera and Udemy, two of the most prominent online-learning platforms, restricted access to their websites in Syria because of sanctions applied by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) at the United States Department of Treasury. OFAC should stop including Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in sanctions because the decision to limit access […]
On Wednesday, the Syrian Telecommunication Regulatory Authority (TRA) announced that it was considering blocking voice calls on WhatsApp and other Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services to increase revenues in the telecommunications industry, according to an Al-Watan report. However, the decision will present a direct threat to Syrians’ rights to privacy, lead to an increase […]
Seventeen Arab activists, including myself and Alaa Sayegh representing SMEX, met in the ever-charming city of Amman for a weekend of presentations, conversations, and workshops hosted by 7iber, a Jordanian citizen media collective, and supported by 7amleh, a Palestinian citizen media collective, and the American Friends Service Committee. The conference—tweets were aggregated with the hashtag […]
Arab users of the social news website Reddit, known as Redditors, started the “r/Arabs Dialect Project” to “compile and display the variety of Arabic dialects spoken in the Arab World and beyond.” Nine months later, 14 countries have been represented by 32 participants displaying a wide range of dialects. In fact, the dialects were sometimes […]
